E69: Elon Musk on Twitter's bot problem, SpaceX's grand plan, Tesla stories, Giga Texas & more

0:00 Bestie Guestie Elon Musk joins via Zoom at the All-In Summit! 0:43 Benchmarking Twitter's bot problem, thoughts on slights from the Biden Administration 13:26 Breaking down Tesla's 6+ businesses, comparing them to a traditional car company 21:42 Concerns around the Twitter deal, crypto payments on Twitter 30:19 Building vs. acquiring, early Tesla stories 39:52 SpaceX's grand vision and business model, nuclear fusion vs. solar 56:37 Moving from CA to TX, fixing California, macroeconomic takes 1:10:20 American exceptionalism, a new immigration strategy Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg https://twitter.com/elonmusk Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffec

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  So, live, from an undisclosed location, with the sultry filter on.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  Very sultry filter on. Having a great hair day. Yeah, that is a good hair day for you. Great hair day, my pal. And your favorite CEO and Twitterer, Mr. Elon Musk. How you doing, pal?

• 0:43Jason Calacanis?

  Appreciate you coming to the event, and zooming in. What's new in your world?

• 0:54Elon Musk?

  Well, let's see. I guess, right now, I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter.

• 1:03Elon Musk?

  With "prah" on Twitter.

• 1:09Elon Musk?

  Currently, what I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots. It's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically.

• 1:23Elon Musk?

  We have no idea what kind of witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine this bot percentage.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  How do you determine?

• 1:30Elon Musk?

  I said, "Why don't I try calling people?" But I haven't got a response. Like, have you tried calling people or something? Like, maybe?

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Does it answer? It's not a bot?

• 1:39Elon Musk?

  No, I don't know. But I think that would be one of the things to do, to say, "Have you tried calling them?" As opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here. That's impossible. Obviously, you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account, or is being operated, where one person's operating 1,000 accounts or something.

• 1:58Elon Musk?

  But that person can only buy one toaster. They're not going to buy 1,000 toasters. So, you care about the number of unique, real people that are on the system. It's extremely fundamental. And anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam, and just a lot of fake accounts. So, it seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of...

• 2:28Elon Musk?

  Essentially, the number of real, said another way, the number of real, unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%. That is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience? I mean.

• 2:51Elon Musk?

  I mean, really?

• 2:56Elon Musk?

  Listen, like, there's a bridge, I'd like to sell ya, you know.

• 3:01Elon Musk?

  You know.

• 3:03Elon Musk?

  And also, you can buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

• 3:08David Friedberg?

  What do you think it is? What do you, yeah, what's the, I mean, anecdotal? If it's not 5%, what is it?

• 3:14Elon Musk?

  I think it's a number that is probably at least four or five times that number. But I'd say at, if you did sort of the, the lowest estimate would be probably 20%.

• 3:29Elon Musk?

  And, and this, and this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the, the sort of daily, daily users and their conclusion is also about, is about 20%. But that's a lower bound. It's not an upper bound. If you look at, say, the most liked tweets on Twitter. So I, I have the, the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human.

• 4:04Elon Musk?

  This is, thank you, everyone, for liking my tweet.

• 4:10Elon Musk?

  Including you, some of the bots out there. But that tweet is less than 5 million likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that. And that, that was the, where I tweeted about that next time buying Coca-Cola, just put the cocaine back in.

• 4:31Elon Musk?

  It's definitely, it's clearly something that the public really wants and...

• 4:37Elon Musk?

  You know, Coca-Cola Corporation should really think about going back to their roots. Um, you know, some OD Coca-Cola. Um, I mean, this, this, I guess, is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow. Uh, because they had Coca-Cola with cocaine. This is real reason.

• 4:58Elon Musk?

  So, um, anyway, that was, that's, that is literally the most popular tweet, um, of any, of any living human. Um, and, but Twitter says that the daily monet, the sort of monetizable daily active users is 217 million. Um, so why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only, you know, two, two and a half percent of the entire user base? This, this seems a very, very low number.

• 5:33Elon Musk?

  And, um, and the most popular tweets generally clustered around that sort of four million, uh, like level. So it's a sort of, like basically 2% or less than 2% of, of the, uh, daily active users. And technically monetizable daily active users is how Twitter refers to it. So it just seems, how is this possible? Um, surely there's something that maybe, you know, 10% of people would like, not merely 2%.

• 6:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, actually, you know, if you think about it, Elon, um, there's a corollary on YouTube. What do, what's the total user base of YouTube? And what have the most popular videos gotten there?

• 6:10Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 6:10Jason Calacanis?

  And I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube. And those, the most popular videos have tens of billions of views.

• 6:19Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 6:19Jason Calacanis?

  That might be instructive.

• 6:21Elon Musk?

  Exactly. That ratio makes a lot more sense. Um, so there's something that doesn't add up here. Um, and my concern is, is not that, is it like, you know, is it five or, or seven or eight percent? But is it potentially 80% or 90% but?

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Elon Musk?

  You know, is it, I mean, I certainly know there's some real people on Twitter, but, but what's, if it, is it an order of magnitude? Is it, is it 50% instead of five? And that's obviously an incredibly material number, especially since Twitter relies primarily on brand advertising as opposed to specific click-through advertising where you make a purchase. If you, if you make a purchase, it, it doesn't really matter that much. But for brand advertising, which is really just awareness advertising, it matters if, if real humans are seeing that or not.

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, and so I guess stepping back for a second, people are curious why you want to buy Twitter? Why is this so important to you? And then I guess, what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point? So a two-parter.

• 7:29Jason Calacanis?

  Why is it so important to you?

• 7:31Elon Musk?

  I mean, some of this I've articulated before, but I think there's a need for a, a, a public town square, digital town square that, where people can debate issues of all kinds, including the most substantive issues. And in order for, for that to be the case, you have to have something that is as broadly inclusive as possible, that has as much of the, the people on the platform as possible, where it's, it feels balanced from a political standpoint. It's not biased one way or the other. And where the system is transparent. This is why I think it's important to put the algorithm on, on GitHub and actually allow the public to, to see it and critique it and improve it.

• 8:14Elon Musk?

  And if there are any manual changes, sort of shadow banning, as it's called, or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet that's done manually, that that should be noted. So you know what has happened and it's not just. You know, you're just where it is right now, where you don't know what the heck is going on. Why is one tweet doing well, why is another tweet not? Is it the algorithm that someone manually intervened? Why are some accounts banned with no recourse, apparently? And, you know, the reality is that Twitter at this point, you know, has a very far-left bias.

• 8:57Elon Musk?

  And I would classify myself as a moderate, neither Republican nor Democrat. And in fact, I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats historically, overwhelmingly. Like, I'm not sure, I might never have voted for a Republican, just to be clear.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 9:12Elon Musk?

  Now, this election, I will.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  David, you OK?

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Keep going, keep going, he's fine, he's fine, we're gonna resuscitate him. We're gonna resuscitate David Sacks. I mean, let me ask you a question.

• 9:29Elon Musk?

  The point I'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to, you know, it's not some right-wing takeover, as people on the left may fear, but rather a moderate-wing takeover and an attempt to ensure that people of all, you know, political beliefs feel welcome on a digital town square and they can express their beliefs without fear of being banned or shadow banned. And that we obviously need to get rid of the bots and scams and trolls and people that are operating huge bot armies in an attempt to unduly influence the public opinion. So, this is what, I think it's very important that we have that.

• 10:12Elon Musk?

  Like, the, some of the smartest people in history have thought about it and said, like, free speech is important for a healthy democracy, it is important. And free speech only matters.

• 10:31Elon Musk?

  Like say, when does free speech matter most? It's when someone, when it's someone you don't like saying something you don't like.

• 10:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Elon Musk?

  That's when it actually matters. So, you know, can't, obviously, and, and, and it's, it's pretty annoying when someone you don't like says something you don't like. That's, that's, that's bad, but it's actually a good sign of, that, that you have free speech. So, I mean, I get trashed by the media all the time. It's fine. I don't care. Uh, good, do, do it twice as much. I couldn't care less. Um, but it's indicative of the fact that even though, um, I, you know, I have like a lot of resources, I do not actually have the ability to stop the media from trashing me, and that's actually a good thing.

• 11:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I, I have to ask, um, with regard to this current administration, I, I know how hard you work, uh, on the car company. And then Biden, you know, uh, you've been a lifelong Democrat, you've donated to Obama and to everybody, probably never voted Republican. And yet, and, and the same is true for Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan is, you know, a Bernie Sanders supporter. And that Democratic Party has been openly hostile to Joe Rogan, and Biden can't even say the word Tesla, or invite you to the White House when they do an EV summit. I'm curious, just on a very personal basis, what does it feel like to, to have that experience where the party you supported is, won't even say the name of your company, or invite you there?

• 12:00Jason Calacanis?

  They should be celebrating the work you're doing.

• 12:03Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, it, it definitely feels like this is not right. Like, this is, uh, the, the, the issue here is that there's just, uh, this, the, the Democratic Party is overly, overly controlled by the unions and by the, uh, trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers. And generally, if you, if you'll see something that doesn't, that is not in the interest of, of the people, um, is, if, on the, on the Democrat side, it's going to come because of the unions, uh, which is just another form of monopoly, and the, uh, the trial lawyers. That's where actions will be happening from the Democrat side. They're not in the interest of the people. And then, to be fair, on the Republican side, if you say like, where is

• 12:45Elon Musk?

  something like not not ideal happening, it's because of corporate evil and religious zealotry. But that's generally where the bad things will be coming from on the Republican side, that are not representative of the people. So in the case of Biden, he is simply too too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama. So in the case of Obama, you could have, you know, he was sort of quite reasonable. And I think he took more of a view of that, you know, obviously, you take the concerns of the unions into account, but there are bigger issues at stake. And unfortunately, Biden does not do that.

• 13:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elon, I have a Tesla question. I read today, it's incredible, there was a Bloomberg article that said the following. So the setup is this. It said, since you went public, Tesla's up 22,000%, 11 quarters of sequential profitability, so hitting on all cylinders. But the public analyst.

• 13:45Elon Musk?

  He has a cylinder.

• 13:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's a car joke. That's a combust.

• 13:51Elon Musk?

  You're stepping on the gas pedal, firing on all cylinders.

• 13:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But analysts, when they put out their projections, okay, it's it's one of the most enormous bands for any company in America. The the price targets for Tesla, despite all of this success, some have it at 200, some have it at 1600. It's all over the place. You tweeted a couple of months ago, Tesla's not a company. It's like six companies inside of a company. Like you've had to build. Yeah, maybe more. Can you just explain to people, all these companies inside the super company, just so folks have a sense of what had to be done to get here?

• 14:29Elon Musk?

  Okay, I mean, this question requires thought, and I'll probably be leaving out quite a few things. But if you look at, say, what what does a typical car company do? What they do is they they.

• 14:43Elon Musk?

  They assemble vehicles and they send them to dealers and they manage the supply chain. They might make the engine or typically will make the engine, but most of the parts are made by suppliers. And a lot of the actual technology development is done by suppliers and most of this vehicle's software is done by suppliers. So the actual amount of real work done by car companies, what you think of sort of like a GM or Ford, is not actually that much. And but like, so they don't do, they don't do sales, they don't do service.

• 15:19Elon Musk?

  They, so in the case of Tesla, for example, we, we do, we do our own sales and service. We don't have dealerships. Then Tesla also has by far the biggest network of superchargers, sort of the electric equivalent of gas stations. So we built the entire global supercharger network, which is still the most advanced and by far the best way to charge your car when traveling long distance or if you live in a city and and don't have the ability to charge your car in a street parking or an apartment. So the whole supercharger network, we developed the supercharger network, we deployed it, I think we have 15,000 superchargers globally.

• 16:00Elon Musk?

  You can travel anywhere in America right now with the Tesla Supercharger Network.

• 16:06Elon Musk?

  Then in terms of vertical integration, we we make the battery pack, the power electronics, the drive unit.

• 16:17Elon Musk?

  We, we actually make, we're more integrated in the parts, we actually make so much of the car internally. We're vertically integrated, not necessarily because we think that there's some religious reason to be vertically integrated, but because the pace at which we needed to move was just much faster than the supply chain could move. And to the degree that you inherit the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, cost and technology. And then Tesla is as much a software company as it is a hardware company. So the software that runs in Tesla operates the car, operates the screen, does the charging. All of that stuff is developed by Tesla. And so we have sort of a car, a Tesla OS in the car.

• 17:03Elon Musk?

  I could go on for a long time. And then, very importantly, Tesla has built

• 17:12Elon Musk?

  an autopilot AI team from scratch. That is the best real-world AI team on Earth. And if anyone else has got a better one, I'd like to see it demonstrated in a car. The full self-driving beta at this point can very often take you with zero interventions across the Bay Area from San Jose to Marin. So through complex traffic, it's really quite sophisticated. And I'd invite anyone to join the beta or look at the videos of those who are in the beta. We've got like 100,000 people in the beta, so it's not tiny. And we'll be expanding that to probably a million people, or a million, I don't know, on that order by the end of the year. So it's...

• 17:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You had this slide.

• 17:57Elon Musk?

  We also built a chip team because there wasn't hardware that we could run the friggin' AI on. We couldn't just fill the trunk with a whole bunch of GPUs.

• 18:12Elon Musk?

  They would have cranked a trunk full of GPUs that would have been very expensive and take a massive amount of power and cooling just to be able to do what the Tesla-designed full self-driving computer can do. So, and we started a chip team from scratch, designed it. It was the best in the world, and still is the best in the world several years later. And we also then developed, we were designing a dojo supercomputer to be able to process the, all the video that's coming in from billions of miles of data. Because, just sort of like the way that it's critical to compete with Google because they have so much data and they have all the people doing searches all the time and humanity is training it. The same is true of Tesla. You really need billions of miles, ultimately tens of billions of miles of training data,

• 18:55Elon Musk?

  combined with a sort of a vast training computer, and then optimize inference hardware in the car, and state-of-the-art AI and training and specialized software across the board to be able to achieve a full self-driving solution.

• 19:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just want, when he opened Tesla Gigafactory, remember this, 67 years ago? I'll just tell the audience a story quickly, Elon. He puts a slide up there and he says, "Guys, we're not actually building..." A factory, we're building a machine that makes machines and he puts the layout of the factory and it looks like a chip. And it was basically like how you would actually lay out a microchip if you were, or you know, you were like a layout engineer. It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen. I was like, that was when I first got it.

• 19:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, you walk on ten and you see what's happening.

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  And you have an insurance company now, you're doing insurance for Tesla owners.

• 19:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And an Uber competitor.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and eventually a robot taxi Uber competitor, R I P.

• 19:48Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I mean, insurance is like quite significant.

• 19:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, are you okay?

• 19:53Jason Calacanis?

  I'm okay, okay, yeah.

• 19:56Elon Musk?

  Because the, the, the car insurance thing is a bigger deal than it may seem. A lot of people are paying, you know, thirty, forty percent as much as their lease payment for the car in, in car insurance. So the car insurance industry is incredibly inefficient because they're, they're just, firstly, you've got like so many sort of middle entities. You've got, you've got from insurance agent all the way to the final sort of reinsurer. There's like a half a dozen companies each taking a cut. And then the, it's all very statistical so that this, even if you're a very good driver, like you could be like, you know, twenty years old and a great driver, but they, it's all statistical, so you can't get, you either can't get insurance or it's extremely expensive.

• 20:39Elon Musk?

  So Tesla allows for real-time insurance based on how you actually drive the car. You can actually, if you drive the car in a safer way, you actually have lower insurance. So ours is, is, insurance is based on how you actually drive, not how, you know, historically people that, you know, fit your whatever demographic have drive. And then you can close the loop around your insurance rate by simply driving better and looking at your score and, and, and lowering your insurance in real time. And people do it, actually promotes safer driving.

• 21:12Jason Calacanis?

  I, I actually have had this experience because in my household, two people drive my car and one of them has a ninety-three score and the other one does not. They have like a sixty score. And you may have met this other person, but I've been trying to work with her on the aggressive turns and stops in advance of our insurance bill, which we're hoping will go down at some point. You didn't... the one question, is this Twitter deal gonna get closed, you think? What are the chances here?

• 21:45Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, it really depends on a lot of factors here. I'm still waiting for some sort of logical explanation for the number of sort of fake or spam accounts on Twitter, and Twitter is refusing to tell us. So, you know, this just seems like a strange thing.

• 22:08Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, sorry, are they refusing to tell you? You don't think they really know? I mean, there's a good chance they may just have no idea.

• 22:15Elon Musk?

  They claim that they do know.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Elon Musk?

  And they claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand.

• 22:24Jason Calacanis?

  But the guy who landed two rockets simultaneously can't understand.

• 22:31Elon Musk?

  So when you do the witches brew, you stir this cauldron, and then you throw the novel home, and...

• 22:36Jason Calacanis?

  Double, double, Hobbsworth.

• 22:39Elon Musk?

  And cast a spell, and then suddenly it comes to you in a dream. I don't know. But there should be some, you know, objective way to set the thing, because this is a material public state...

• 22:54Jason Calacanis?

  Stressful issue, yeah.

• 22:55Elon Musk?

  You know, it's a, you know, it's a material adverse misstatement. You know, if they in fact have been vociferously claiming less than 5% of fake or spam accounts, but in fact it is four or five times that number, or perhaps 10 times that number, this is a big deal. It's not the... it seems like if you said, "Okay, I'm gonna... I agree to buy your house. You say the house has less than 5% termites. That's an acceptable number. But if it turns out it is 90% termites, that's not okay, you know? It's not the same house. This house is made mostly of termites."

• 23:37Elon Musk?

  If I leave, literally, your house will disappear because it's mostly made in two months. So that would obviously just not be appropriate. So in making the Twitter offer, I was obviously reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings. If those filings are not accurate, it's simply not, that's, it's not, you can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed.

• 24:03Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, they say, Elon, life's a negotiation. So at a different price, it might be a totally viable deal, correct?

• 24:11Elon Musk?

  I mean, that, I mean, it's not out of the question. But I really would, you know, this is, you know, the more questions I ask, the more I, the more my concerns grow. So,

• 24:30Elon Musk?

  you know, at the end of the day, acquiring has to be fixable and fixable with reasonable timeframe and without revenues collapsing along the way and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I really need to see how these things are being calculated. And it can't be some deep mystery that is like more complex than the human soul or something like that. It's gotta be, you know, I think we can apply the scientific method to this and try to figure out what's really going on. And Twitter's revenue is primarily dependent, I think 70% or some of that order, on brand advertising as opposed to specific purchase

• 25:12Elon Musk?

  advertising. This is a big deal because brand advertising is not, there's not a, there's not a purchase that results from that. So it's basically, you know, how much mind share or like basically if you're a big company, how often do they hear your name? It's as opposed to something that where you can directly measure the outcome. So that that means that they're somewhat going on faith. And if that faith is undermined or reduced because of the reality of the situation coming to the fore, then the Tesla's revenue, Twitter's, sorry, the T, Twitter's revenue will be significantly impaired. And that's a major problem.

• 25:53Jason Calacanis?

  Elon, did you have a chance to ask these questions during your negotiation?

• 25:58Elon Musk?

  The, like I said, I was reliant upon their public filings. So to the degree that they're probably public, and this is normal for a public company. If you, you know, if you make a formal filing, that is what investors are relying upon, relying on whether they are making an acquisition offer or simply buying some shares. So this, this, the accuracy of these filings is important whether you're buying one share or the whole company. And so if these filings are inaccurate, or if they're sort of potentially blatant, it's a big deal.

• 26:36David Sacks?

  Elon, do you have a sense of why this has been such a persistent problem for Twitter? Do they not have the technical capabilities to solve the bot problem? Or is it more of like just a, they've under-prioritized the issue or have been unwilling to because potentially there are implications for ad, ad, ad revenue?

• 26:54Elon Musk?

  I, I, I don't know. It's sort of speculative at this point. So the, you know, the, the, the worst interpretation would be that they don't want to look too closely at the thing because they might not like the answer. That would be the worst interpretation. But the best, I'm not sure what the best interpretation is, but the least bad interpretation would be maybe they thought it was this way, but the way they were doing it was wrong and they didn't realize they were mistaken and simply weren't paying enough attention. It does seem as though it should be a lot easier to get rid of the bots and spam and trolls than, like, this is not some, we're not trying to split the atom here, you know? We're not trying to get to the moon, okay? We're just trying to limit the amount of obviously scammy accounts.

• 27:38Elon Musk?

  If it's, if it's like Bitcoin giveaway, you know, probably it's, it's a spammer, you know, like.

• 27:50Elon Musk?

  Maybe, you know.

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, you're not giving away 100 Bitcoin? I just sent you 10.

• 27:58Elon Musk?

  If you send me 2 Bitcoin, I'll send you one back, right? That's my...

• 28:02Jason Calacanis?

  What if I send you 20?

• 28:05Jason Calacanis?

  Actually, I thought one of the interesting things that came up in your product roadmap, or I guess this was released and people covered it, was the possibility of Twitter becoming kind of a super app with payments included, perhaps even Doge or something. This seems to me, based on your work with David, a PayPal, like a pretty brilliant idea. What's the vision there in terms of if you were able to buy it, perhaps at the right price? What would it look like if I could add Jason to, at Elon Musk, 10 bucks or something? If we were splitting a check or something?

• 28:44Elon Musk?

  Sure, well, for those that have used WeChat, I think that's, WeChat's actually a good model. If you're in China, it's basically, you kind of live on WeChat, it does everything. It's sort of like Twitter plus PayPal plus a whole bunch of other things. And all rolled into one with actually a great interface and it's really an excellent app. And we don't have anything like that outside of China. So I think such an app would be really useful. And just like the utility of it, of sort of a spam-free thing where you can make comments,

• 29:23Elon Musk?

  you can post videos, you can, I think it's important for content creators to have a revenue share. Now, this does not need to be done on Twitter. It could be done from something that's created from scratch. So it could be something new. So really, but I think this thing needs to exist, whether it is converting Twitter to be the sort of like, kind of all-encompassing app that, like I said, everything from Digital Townsquare, where important ideas are debated, you know, maximally trusted and inclusive. And at a point where you sort of have a high-trust situation than payments, whether it's crypto or fiat, can make a lot of sense.

• 30:06Elon Musk?

  Just want something that's incredibly useful and that people love using. So, but it's either convert Twitter to that or start something new. Those are the two, but it does need to happen somehow.

• 30:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's interesting you bring that up because the price of Twitter is pretty high. And you've built a couple of companies and some engineers like to come work for you. And you've now gone through the intellectual exercise of studying all this. If you're looking at the two choices now, fixing Twitter, given all these problems, and maybe just starting your own version, which one are you leaning towards? Because I have watched you build a couple of companies and the products have turned out pretty good. So is it easier for someone like you to just start from scratch? I mean.

• 30:51Elon Musk?

  I mean, it's certainly the, my default inclination is to start things from scratch. I mean, I'm not really, I don't buy things like, there's still this sort of, you know,

• 31:05Elon Musk?

  like SpaceX was started from scratch. You know, in the case of Tesla, you know, it was like five people. Still this guy, Mark Everhard, who's the worst guy I've ever worked with, who tries to claim like sole credit essentially for creating Tesla. And if he's so damn great, why didn't he just go, you know, create another car company when he was fired? But anyway.

• 31:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, that's a pretty good story. I mean.

• 31:31Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Jason Calacanis?

  I remember. I mean, no, but I remember having this conversation with you. We were having a conversation about the roadster. I think I can tell this story. And I said, how's it going, pal? And you said, well, I got one problem.

• 31:45Jason Calacanis?

  It turns out the roadster parts and putting it together cost 190,000. And I said, I gave you 150 for number 16. So if you make 2,000 of these, you're going to lose 80 million dollars. And you were like, yeah, or double that. I mean, they basically, the parts of the car cost more than they were selling it for when you were starting to get involved. That's, it was this.

• 32:06Elon Musk?

  No, no, I got involved well before that.

• 32:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, before that, yes.

• 32:10Elon Musk?

  I got involved when Twitter, when Tesla was nothing but a piece of paper. Let me be crystal clear. Crystal fucking clear. No, they didn't bring me in.

• 32:22Elon Musk?

  Either. I was gonna start, I was gonna start an EV company with JB Strumble. And based on the AC Propulsion T zero. And when I, when I asked AC Propulsion if it was okay to do that, they said, well, there's also some others who want to create an EV company, but have not created one yet. Yes. Wouldn't like to join forces with them. And I said, okay, well, we'll do that. That was a huge mistake. JB and I should have just started the car company ourselves. Instead, we teamed up with Everhard, Topning and Wright. Big mistake. The, the, the, the actual moral error here was me trying to have my cake and eat it too. Which is like, I just want to work on the technology and the product and have someone

• 33:06Elon Musk?

  else be the CEO and, and, and sort of run the business operations. Cause I just like working on technology and product and design. And, and also I was like doing SpaceX, you know, at the time and our office was blowing up. So it seemed like, okay, this is like, I always wanted to do an electric car company. This is how I can have my cake and eat it too. That was a huge mistake and fundamentally a moral error. And so, so in the end, I had to frigging be CEO and I didn't want to be, basically. So, but it's either that or a company's gonna die. So, so we started with, with really just nothing and the, you know, the T zero prototype from AC Propulsion, not, not, if, if that's the, that's the precursor to Tesla. Yeah.

• 33:51Elon Musk?

  To be one half second clear, once again, when we created Tesla, when I, when I joined, there were no, no employees, there was no intellectual property, there was no prototype, there was no, nothing. Yeah. To be crystal fucking clear.

• 34:13Jason Calacanis?

  And it almost bankrupted you. I mean, you that sent you to the cliff of insolvent.

• 34:21Elon Musk?

  Yes, we were on the ragged edge of bankruptcy so many times, it was ridiculous.

• 34:27Elon Musk?

  So, 2008 was one of the worst years where basically the, you know, GM and Ford, just GM and

• 34:36Elon Musk?

  Ford almost went bankrupt. And, you know, trying to raise money for a startup electric car company in 2008 while GM's going bankrupt was difficult to say the least. You know, people were angry that I even asked them for money. They're like, fuck you and hang up.

• 34:58Elon Musk?

  So, the only way that Tesla actually made it through 2008 was a subset of the existing investors,

• 35:07Elon Musk?

  which includes like people like Antonio Gracias and, you know, Steve Jobinson and a few other key people, Aaron Price, who I hold a debt of gratitude to to this day. And I put in all the money I had left and they said everything, literally everything. I didn't even have a house. So, my ex-wife had the house. So, I was like staying actually in Jeff Skoll's bedroom, spare bedroom. And, but the subset of the investors would say, okay, I put in as much as I put in. So, I put in everything. And then we closed that round 6pm, Christmas Eve,

• 35:52Elon Musk?

  2008. It was the last hour of the last day that it was possible because after that, people kept breaking for the holidays and we would have bounced payroll two days after Christmas.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  It was a pretty, I mean, it was an incredible moment in time. And people also forget at the time that the first two rockets SpaceX sent up didn't exactly make it to orbit. Like,

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  the first three. And I remember having dinner with you at that time. And I asked you, hey, how's it going? I heard Gawker says you got four weeks of payroll left. And you said, that's not true. And I said, thank God. And you said, we have two.

• 36:31Jason Calacanis?

  I said

• 36:31Elon Musk?

  No, I mean, both SpaceX and Tesla in 2008, if we'd simply paid our suppliers on time, we would have gone bankrupt immediately.

• 36:39Jason Calacanis?

  Tell us, tell us actually, it was a, it was a pretty crazy moment in time because I also remember asking you at, we were having dinner at BOA and I said, well, certainly it's got to be some good news. And you took out your BlackBerry to date the conversation, I don't remember it.

• 36:55Elon Musk?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:56Jason Calacanis?

  And you said, "Don't tell anybody, Jake." I said, "No problem." And you showed me the clay version of the Model S.

• 37:02Elon Musk?

  Yeah.

• 37:03Jason Calacanis?

  The most beautiful car I'd ever seen. And I said, "Oh, my God, it's stunning. How much is it going to cost?" He said, "I think I can make it for $50,000." I remember it was yesterday. I said, "If you make that car for $50,000, you'll change the fucking world." And you did it.

• 37:15Elon Musk?

  It was a little more than $50,000, but, uh, you know.

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  How's your? Let's ask about SpaceX. Okay, well, let's ask about SpaceX, but I, I want to ask one more personal question. Has life gotten easier for you as these companies have hit scale? Or has the complexity made life even more challenging? Because those early days, it was just fighting to survive. Nobody knew who you were. You were anonymous. And it was really just about the work. And now, let's face it, you're the world's most famous guy, and everybody's watching everything you do. But these companies are also very big. So what's life like for you today? Are you enjoying what you're doing every day?

• 37:57Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, it's somewhat of a roller coaster. So there are like good days and bad days. And there's, there were also crisis issues. And, you know, like sort of, you know, knock on wood, like, we're not like, facing, you know, death in the face. Like, it's, it's definitely like quite stressful when like, you know, death is like trying to eat your face off and like the foam is like, you know, just getting, and like, yeah, right there, you know?

• 38:28Elon Musk?

  No, that's it's pretty stressful in that situation. So like, you know, both SpaceX and Tesla have, you know, significant cash reserves. So like, you know, it's not we're staring death in the face. We can sort of see it over in the horizon, you know, so don't want to get complacent or entitled. Because, but if it's not like just sort of foaming at the mouth, gnashing, trying to eat your face off on a daily basis, that's definitely we've moved on from that point. And hopefully never, never return. But there are a lot of issues that need to be, it's just like, if you're CEO of a company, the chore level is high. And if you don't do your chores, then the company goes to hell. And I hate doing chores, frankly.

• 39:14Elon Musk?

  So who does?

• 39:17Elon Musk?

  So that's the real, like, there's a whole bunch of sort of, you know, personnel issues and legal issues and things that I, I don't find enjoyable to work on. But if I don't work on them, the company suffers. So it's more like, just the sheer volume of work is insane. That's the, and then, and then, you know, go do some, go add to it with, you know, Twitter or something like that.

• 39:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 39:41Elon Musk?

  I mean, honestly.

• 39:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're an extra processor.

• 39:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah. I mean, I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and then just sitting there with like chipmunk cheeks.

• 39:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Alissa, Yon, tell us a little bit about where we are at SpaceX. Like how you fund the ability to go to Mars, but then also commercially still build a conventional space business domestically. I think this Russia thing was probably really good for SpaceX. If you want to just tell us a little bit about that.

• 40:14Elon Musk?

  Sure.

• 40:16Elon Musk?

  I mean, the goal of SpaceX is to develop the technology that enables life to become multi-planetary and.

• 40:23Elon Musk?

  And make humanity a spacefaring civilization, which I think is a very exciting, inspiring thing. And it's like some one of those things where you can that that I think just makes kids like be excited about the future. And and we need things that are inspiring and exciting and make the future seem like it's gonna be better than the past. Life can't just be about solving one miserable problem after another. It's gotta be like like what's what's inspiring and exciting. And I think that a future where we are a spacefaring civilization is is one that we can all get excited about. And and we can go out there and find out what what's what's out there in your in the universe and what's the meaning of life and, you know, where are the aliens and hopefully they're friendly.

• 41:04Elon Musk?

  And that kind of thing. So, you know, it's it's interesting. I do get asked about the aliens question a lot. And I've I've not seen any evidence of of aliens. And I'll I'll be the first to, you know, tweet about it or whatever if I found if I see something.

• 41:21Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you'll tell us if you find them.

• 41:22Elon Musk?

  I will tell you, I will definitely tell you if there's aliens. And, you know, I think it would be quite helpful for, you know, like, like, if we found aliens, like, probably SpaceX would get a ton more revenue because people are like, oh, man, aliens, we're gonna upgrade our space technology pronto. Because what if we're unfriendly? You know, it's like, you know,

• 41:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is the idea that is the idea that you build, basically, the ability to do orbital cargo, take all those profits, launch Starlink, take all those profits, and move it all into building something that can get to Mars? Is that the kind of rough plan?

• 42:06Elon Musk?

  Pretty much. It's if it was like a three step, a three slide PowerPoint, it would be pretty much as you described, which is develop rockets that are that are capable of of taking satellites to orbit and crew to the space station.

• 42:24Elon Musk?

  Yeah, basically servicing government, commercial, space launch needs. And then build a global communication system in space that obviously it does a lot of good for Earth by providing internet connectivity to the least served. Because a satellite system is really great for remote locations and, you know, countryside or remote islands or places where someone's trying to cut off their internet.

• 42:52Jason Calacanis?

  As a prelude to a war, we take down the internet system like in Star Wars?

• 43:00Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Yeah, so it's like, you know, so it can be pretty, pretty helpful. Like, I think, like, Starlink basically, I think, is a sort of forceful grid in its own right by providing connectivity to the least served, where they've got either no connection or a very expensive or poor connection. You know, the, like, we're connecting a lot of schools, remote schools in Brazil right now. I'm actually going to be headed there to sort of kick things off. But they've got a lot of schools that have no connectivity at all. And in a modern age, how do you learn with no connectivity? I mean, you get, I guess, old textbooks and stuff, but it's really, you're at a huge disadvantage if you have no digital connectivity.

• 43:45Elon Musk?

  So I think there's just a lot of good that Starlink can do in it just by itself, but then the revenue generated from Starlink is what can enable the creation of a permanently crewed base on the moon, which will be the next, you know, next step from Apollo, which is like, let's just not go there for a few hours and then head back. Let's have a permanently occupied science station on the moon. And we could also build some pretty epic telescopes on the moon that would enable us to learn more about the nature of the universe and figure out what's going on and maybe detect those aliens.

• 44:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you, do you, do you think that there's enough profit in those businesses to fund all this? Or do you need Wall Street and other investors to come share the load with you?

• 44:34David Friedberg?

  Is going to Mars a partnership with the government? Does it need to partner with governments to get there?

• 44:41Elon Musk?

  Well, I think technically it does not need to partner with governments. But of course, government support would be helpful. So, I mean, it's gonna be very expensive to build a self-sustaining city on Mars. Like, in order for us to become multi-planetary in a way that's meaningful, the key threshold is, at which point does the city become self-sustaining? Such that if the ships from Earth stop coming for any reason, and it could be any reason, it could be World War III, or it could be just, you know, civilization subsided and just gradually got decrepit or something. But if the ships stop coming,

• 45:23Elon Musk?

  if the resupply ships from Earth stop coming to Mars for any reason, does the city still survive? And that's like, really, a large base of resources that are needed on Mars. You can't be missing any one critical ingredient. And you can think of this like, there are these various great filters, you know, that perhaps stop civilizations. And one of the great filters is, will we become a multi-planet species or not? Will humanity be one of those species that passes the great filter of going beyond the one planet and being a multi-planet species? And this is certainly something we'll have to do at some point, because the Sun is expanding and will eventually boil the oceans and destroy all life on Earth. So if you care about life on Earth,

• 46:08Elon Musk?

  you should really care about life becoming multi-planetary and ultimately multi-stellar, because otherwise, you're basically saying you're signing the sort of death warrant for all life as we know it. It's inevitable. And then there's also the various things that kill us, you know, the dinosaurs and, I mean, you look at the fossil record, there've been five major extinctions that are sort of on the order of 89% of all creatures on Earth dying for a wide range of reasons. But, and then humans can also, you know, with the World War III danger that other creatures didn't have, where we could do ourselves in by sort of misusing advanced technology

• 46:50Elon Musk?

  and sort of just, you know, having some radioactive hellhole that's all that's left after World War III. So... You know, you could even characterize it potentially as which will come first, World War III or life becoming multi-planetary on Mars? Yeah.

• 47:08David Friedberg?

  Sorry, I was gonna shift, but you know, when you think about the importance of going to Mars versus solving critical energy and climate change problems here on Earth, obviously the effort with Tesla is related to sustainable energy. And I think going back to like probably the 1950s, there were engineering designs around plasma fusion or fusion-based systems that have evolved to these plasma systems, to these tokamak systems. And every year, every decade, it's like, hey, next decade, we're gonna have it. What's your point of view on where plasma fusion systems are? Are we gonna have fusion energy this century, this decade? And does it create limitless energy where the electricity production goes up by 10,000-fold

• 47:52David Friedberg?

  and the price of electricity drops by 10,000-fold? And then what does that world on Earth look like if that happens? So I guess the question is like, is that technology real? When does it happen? And what happens to the world here when and if that happens?

• 48:06Elon Musk?

  I'll answer that question, but then I'll, let me sort of point out what the, what the actual issue is. If the question is like, is it possible to solve fusion energy? 100% yes, definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely, for sure. So the, and really just using a tokamak style, which is like basically a donut ring with, with electromagnets that control the plasma. The way to solve that is simply scale up the tokamak. Fusion is very much a scale-based thing. You want to minimize your surface-to-volume ratio. So as you scale up a tokamak, you reduce your surface-to-volume ratio, which means

• 48:48Elon Musk?

  like the, the, the volume you have relative to the, the surface, you now have much more, like you, you can basically have a hot zone in the center that's relatively far away from the walls and, and more of a hot zone. So the, the, so it's, it's not in my mind a question as to whether fusion can work, but there is a question as to whether it is economically viable and, and whether it is competitive with, with, with alternatives. I think that the economic viability of fusion is a much bigger question, and I, I think the answer probably is that a fusion Uh, Earth, if fusion is not competitive economically, I think that is, that is a,

• 49:32Elon Musk?

  I, I would say it's probably not competitive economically by an order of magnitude.

• 49:35David Friedberg?

  Where does it break, where does it break, is it a materials breakdown or where does it break down economically?

• 49:41Elon Musk?

  Well, so, so you can't just um use a normal hydrogen, you know, you, you need to use like deuterium and tritium, like unusual forms of hydrogen.

• 49:53David Friedberg?

  Helium 3, yeah.

• 49:54Elon Musk?

  Helium 3, uh, uh, you know, there, um, there are some, uh, some, uh, other types of, of fusion that could be used, uh, but, um, th- these are just not, they're, they're not like, uh, there's not a lot of this raw material. It's quite difficult to get the raw material. So first you have to get the raw material, uh, that's, that's very expensive raw material. Um, and then, um, it's not just about generating the, the, the energy, you've, you've got to, um, turn that energy into usable electricity. You can't just have a hot thing. Okay. So the hot thing has to translate to usable electricity. So I think you've got, you've got a cost of, of fuel issue, which is very significant.

• 50:37Elon Musk?

  Uh, you've got, you got a whole bunch of knockdowns from, uh, when you generate the heat to, uh, when you actually convert that into electricity. Um, you've got some very difficult maintenance issues with, with a, a fusion reactor. Um, so, uh, and, and that should be then compared to alternatives. Uh, the, the sustainable energy alternatives that I think, uh, are overwhelmingly more competitive are, um, uh, solar energy, wind, uh, geothermal, uh, hydro, uh, some title and energy. But it's really primarily, uh, solar, uh, and, and wind. Um, now, and you can really say like, what, what, why bother creating, uh, fusion on Earth?

• 51:22Elon Musk?

  When we have a gigantic fusion reactor in the sky that just works with zero maintenance. And it shows up every day.

• 51:30David Friedberg?

  Pretty consistent, yeah. But Elon, can we scale to 1,000x or 100x our electricity production here using solar and other renewable sources?

• 51:39Elon Musk?

  Yes, so the amount of solar you need to power the United States is remarkably tiny. So you need like basically roughly 100 miles by 100 miles of territory, and it obviously doesn't need to be in one place in the United States to power the United States. It's like a little corner of Texas or Utah, the entire country. And if you, you could basically power, you probably 10x the, just with solar alone, without displacing anyone's home, power an economy 10 times the size of the United States in the United States on land.

• 52:19David Friedberg?

  When energy prices-

• 52:21Elon Musk?

  If you extend that to water, because Earth is 70% water.

• 52:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:26Elon Musk?

  I mean, you could, you could say, okay, now we could probably have a civilization that is 100 times as energy intensive as we currently have it.

• 52:34David Friedberg?

  And so what does that look like with the last part of my question, which is a world where energy costs are, say, like 100 times cheaper than they are today, and we have 100 times more energy production capacity? What changes about civilization, what do we do differently, and what do we see change most kind of dramatically?

• 52:50Elon Musk?

  Well, currently, we're not, because of just generally low birth rates almost worldwide, civilization is not headed to have a population that is in order of magnitude greater than where we're currently, we're currently headed towards a population decline. And this is almost everywhere in the world.

• 53:13Elon Musk?

  So

• 53:16Elon Musk?

  you know, it basically seems as though as soon as you have like urbanization and education beyond a certain level and income beyond a certain level, birth rates plummet. And so as countries get wealthier, their birth rates plummet. It's somewhat counterintuitive because people will say like, well, it's too expensive to have a baby. Nope, the wealthier you are, the fewer kids you have. The more educated you are, the fewer kids you have. So it's the inverse. So I'm not sure who'd use all that energy unless there's a significant change in the birth rate. Or we have a very robot-oriented economy. So that's also possible.

• 53:57Elon Musk?

  So if we've got a lot of, you know, four-wheeled robots in form of cars and androids, humanoid robots, then you can certainly see that there'd be perhaps a need for an order of magnitude more energy.

• 54:13Elon Musk?

  But it's not coming from the humans unless something major changes on the on the human birth rate level. This, by the way, is, I think, the biggest single threat to civilization right now is the...

• 54:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, why do you think societally, people just make those decisions when they become more affluent? Is it that they just become more selfish? Or there's more things for them to do and they have more money to spend on themselves? And they say, you know what? I don't want to have a large family. I want to, you know, go to Coachella.

• 54:44Elon Musk?

  Yeah, well, there is this like weird like mind-viruses thing where some people are, think like having fewer kids is like better for the environment.

• 54:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 54:54Elon Musk?

  Total nonsense.

• 54:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nonsense.

• 54:56Elon Musk?

  The environment's gonna be fine. They're gonna be fine even if we doubled the size of the humans. And I know a lot about environmental stuff. So, you know,

• 55:07Elon Musk?

  we can't have civilization just dwindle into nothing. And, you know, Japan's leading indicator here, like Japan's population declined by 600,000 people last year. That's the lowest birth rate in history. It's, you know, it's pretty bad.

• 55:25Elon Musk?

  So, I don't know. I think... So this one element of is is a lot of people just think that having kids is somehow bad for the environment. I want to be clear, it's not. It's essential for maintaining civilization that we at least maintain our numbers. We don't necessarily need to grow dramatically, but at least let's not, you know, gradually dwindle away until civilization ends with us all in adult diapers and in a whimper. Like, we don't want civilization to end in adult diapers with a whimper. That would suck.

• 55:59Jason Calacanis?

  That'd suck, yeah.

• 56:00Elon Musk?

  Bleak. Bleak and sad.

• 56:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, and you and I have had this conversation. I mean, in Japan, I had two people tell me when I was there, like, I think it's immoral to bring humans into the world. I mean, people have gotten very sad about the future. It's kind of crazy. The world's great. Life's awesome.

• 56:19Elon Musk?

  Yes. No, there's literally, I've heard many times, like, how can I bring a child into this terrible world? I'm like, have you read history? Because let me tell you, it was way worse back then. Okay?

• 56:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Now's a good time. Now's a good time to be bored. Hey, you know, listen, I know you're super busy, but I wanted to ask you about the move to Texas, because I've been thinking about it, Austin. California, I don't know, some senator told you to go fuck yourself and like, you know, like, we don't need to hear.

• 56:48Elon Musk?

  Yeah, I think there's been a couple senators said that, actually.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it seems to be turning into a bit of a trend. But how has building the Tesla Gigafactory, which I got to see in Austin a couple of weeks ago, and it was one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen. I mean, I don't know how many months it took to build there, but how long did it take to build that dreadnought? And then, what would have taken to build that in California, California, under Gavin Newsom?

• 57:18Elon Musk?

  So we built the Gigatexas, which is the biggest factory in North America, I think possibly the biggest factory in the world. And it's three times the size of the Pentagon, to give you a sense of scale. Okay, this is friggin' big. It's like, it's weird, it's like, so big, it's weird. Like, you...

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  I was trying to find you in it, and I was trying to drive around, and it took me about 45 minutes to find you.

• 57:42Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like no, you have to like call, you can't like find someone in the world, you have to call them on their cellphone and say, where are you, you know? Um, so, uh, I mean, the building is like, uh, uh, just under a mile long, and we're actually going to extend it to, will be like literally a mile long. Um, and about a quarter mile wide, uh, and it's, uh, eighty feet tall. So it's just, uh, ridiculously big. Um, and when you think about it, like for manufacturing situation, like what, what, what are the two, the two things that really define manufacturing competitiveness are economies of scale and technology? And so if you've got an ace on economy, like if you've sort of maximized your ace level on, on technology and you maximize your ace level on scale,

• 58:25Elon Musk?

  this is obviously going to be the most competitive situation, and that's why they're so friggin' giant. Um, and the, the, a Giga Texas will go all the way from, um, sell raw materials, like, like, like basically rail cars of cell raw materials coming in, and then forming the, the battery cell, then the battery pack, uh, building the, the, the motor, uh, casting, we're also have introduced a major innovation, which is to cast the entire, uh, front third and rear third of the car and as a single piece. Um, I got this idea from toys, actually, because I was like, how do they make toys? Those are cheap. They just cast them. I was like, well, can you pull the casting machine that big? And they're like, well, no one ever has. I'm like, is, are we breaking physics? Like, no.

• 59:06Elon Musk?

  Well, let's just ask them. And there were six major casting machine suppliers in the world, and five of them said no, and the six said maybe. I'm like, I'll take that as a yes. Um.

• 59:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, this, you wanted to do this for the Model Three, but it was just too soon, huh? Uh, and, and now it's almost there.

• 59:22Elon Musk?

  Yeah, actually, this, this partly comes from the Model Three, which is actually a fantastic car in many ways. Um, um, but we were rightly criticized for an inefficient design, uh, with, for the front and rear body. Um, uh, like Sandy Monroe, who I think is really, has excellent from an engineering standpoint, and, and really a very fair critic. Uh, he, he pistol-whipped us for, um, the, the design of the, the battery.

• 59:47Jason Calacanis?

  He ripped it apart and piece by piece told you why you suck. And then he hit the why and told you why you're awesome.

• 59:53Elon Musk?

  Yeah, he took it apart and told us exactly why, why we sucked, and he was correct. Um, and then, and I was like, well, that's pretty embarrassing. So, uh, no, he was complimentary of other parts of the car, not the body design. And, uh, and so it's like, okay, we're going to go from like, you know, It's just incredibly difficult body to make. It's made out of like 120 different pieces with dissimilar metals that are joined and you've got galvanic corrosion challenges. It's very difficult to make. To a single piece casting, that's one piece. So like 120 pieces went down to like one. So it's a huge and the like the Model Y body shop, especially the new one where we cast both the

• 1:00:35Elon Musk?

  front and rear is 60% smaller than the Model 3 body shop. So it's, you know, gigantic. It's quite, there's a lot of innovations at Tesla besides the stuff that is obvious. So anyway, so yeah, the, but if, and really, you know, to be fair to Gavin Newsom, like, you know, if you, if you had a gun to Gavin's head, okay, and said, we need to build, start building this factory in California right now, he couldn't do it because there are so many regulatory agencies and so many litigators in California that want to stop you from doing anything that

• 1:01:16Elon Musk?

  even if you're the governor of the state, you cannot get it done. So something's got to be done to, to, to, you know, because California used to be the land of opportunity and it's a beautiful state and I love, I loved living there. I still spend a lot of time in California, even though every time I go there, I get, literally every day I go there, I get the Jesus tax out of me.

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  Big tax, big tax bill, by day.

• 1:01:40Elon Musk?

  Yeah, like the sheer cost per day of me going and working in California days boggles the mind. And I mean, I still do it, you know. But the California's gone from the land of opportunity to the land of, of, of sort of taxes, overregulation and litigation. And this is not a good situation. And really, there's got to be like a serious cleaning out of the pipes in California.

• 1:02:04Jason Calacanis?

  How many months was it to get the Giga Austin done? Took a year and a half, two years?

• 1:02:10Elon Musk?

  Yeah, 18, 18 months to build something three times the size of the Pentagon.

• 1:02:13Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. And you just basically, the answer to how many months it would take in California is infinity.

• 1:02:19Elon Musk?

  We would, we would still be working on the permits.

• 1:02:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23David Friedberg?

  Elon, this, this begs a good question, which is, you know, like...

• 1:02:28Elon Musk?

  I'm not exaggerating.

• 1:02:29David Friedberg?

  Can you just keep signing paperwork? We have one more form for you. What's a better model?

• 1:02:34Elon Musk?

  Yes.

• 1:02:35David Friedberg?

  What's a better model for government? So, you know, like, all governments tend to increase in complexity. Dictatorship. Capacity. Is the dictatorship the right model? And, um, you know, like, how do we solve this? Let's say you go to Mars, or let's say you had to fix California. Is California permanently broken? Is there a way to fix it? Or like, how do you set up a better model? So that you don't end up having this, this kind of special interest, complexity situation that eventually kills the, uh, population?

• 1:03:04Elon Musk?

  I mean, I think ultimately with California, the people of California just have to get fed up and, and demand change. That's the thing that really has to happen. And, and, and there's, there's gotta be an above zero percent chance of, of the Republicans winning in California. If, if, if it's, if it's just the Democrats every time, it's gotta be. And this is, this is like occasionally, it, it, the thing is that right, right now, uh, you, you, and plus the level of, level of gerrymandering, uh, which is basically just treating the people like sheep, uh, and, and it's terrible. That's gone on in California is outrageous. So California, uh, the Dems have a supermajority in, um, the House and Senate in California and the governor and everything.

• 1:03:48Elon Musk?

  And so how responsive is any political party going to be to the people if they are guaranteed to win? It's a one-party state. And so, uh, I'm not saying that, you know, go and, and sort of elect the Republicans every time, but if it's never, you're, you're just making California a one-party state. They will no longer be responsive, responsive to the people and will only be responsive to those that funded their political campaigns.

• 1:04:13David Friedberg?

  Clip Elon saying that 30 seconds on TV over and over. Go ahead, Sex.

• 1:04:17David Sacks?

  Yeah. So Elon, shifting gears to the economy, um, you know, we saw this surprise report of negative 1.4% GDP growth in Q1. Interest rates been rising, that increased the cost of the consumer of getting loans, things like that. Uh, we've had a stock market correction, really a crash in a lot of growth stocks, software stocks. From where you sit and the data that you see, uh, where, where do you think the economy is, is headed right now? Do you think we're in a recession or is it just a risk? How do you, how do you assess our current economic situation?

• 1:04:50Elon Musk?

  Well, predicting economic, record economics is always difficult and, and one should assign probabilities to these things. But ironically, I did last year, people asked me what I think about the economy. I said, well, I, I think we might enter a recession in approximately, uh, uh, spring of, of two thousand twenty, of twenty twenty-two.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  All that, nailed it.

• 1:05:10Elon Musk?

  Um, yeah. Um, so, uh, you know, now the thing is that recessions are not necessarily a bad thing. Uh, they, they, you know, um, what, I've now been through a few of them and what, what tends to happen is if you, if you have, um, a boom that goes on for too long, you get misallocation of capital. Uh, it starts raining money on fools, basically. It's like any, any dumb thing gets money and I'm sure you've seen a few of those. Um, so at, at, at, at some point it gets just out of control and you just have a misallocation of, of human capital, uh, where, where people are doing things that are silly and, and not useful to their fellow human beings. Um, and, and then those companies, there needs to be sort of an economic enema, if

• 1:05:53Elon Musk?

  you will, um, to have everyone sort of shift uncomfortably in their seats. Um, so, but, but the

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, it's just I'm visualizing it. The economic enema.

• 1:06:07Elon Musk?

  I mean, listen, it's got alliteration. Um, so, uh,

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  This too shall pass.

• 1:06:16Elon Musk?

  Eventually, the economic enema does its job. It clears out the pipes, if you will.

• 1:06:22Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:23Elon Musk?

  And, um, and, and sort of the, the bullshit companies, um, uh, go bankrupt and the ones that are doing useful products, uh, are prosperous. Um, and, um, but, but there's certainly a lesson here that if one is making useful product and, and, and has a company that makes sense, uh, make sure you're not running things too close to the edge from a capital standpoint, they've got some capital reserves to, uh, last through, uh, irrational times because in the, in the past, when there's been a recession, um, it has gone, it's, it's amazing, it's flipped like a light switch. I mean, David, do you remember this when, from the, from the PayPal, you know, ex PayPal days, when, when, when we, uh, raised a hundred million dollars in March of two thousand,

• 1:07:03Elon Musk?

  uh, and, and we literally, we had, the, the demand was so high, we had, uh, people like VCs, like just literally without even a term sheet, wiring money into our account.

• 1:07:16Jason Calacanis?

  We'll send the term sheet later.

• 1:07:18Elon Musk?

  They literally were like sleuth out our bank account number and wire money in. And we're like, where did this come from? And it's like, oh.

• 1:07:28Elon Musk?

  So it was like, there was literally fire hosing money in March of 2000. And then in April 2000, the market went into freefall. And it went from money raising money was trivial to even good companies could not raise money in a month. So it's just important to bear in mind like that PayPal almost went bankrupt in 2000. It came close. But thankfully, we'd raised that $100 million in March 2000, without which we'd be game over, basically. And we kind of saw it coming. So it's like we got the X Confinity merger done in like three weeks and raised $100 million. Because we were all like, oh, we see this coming to an end pretty soon.

• 1:08:13Elon Musk?

  And then a month later, it was like, you know, a nightmare, basically. And so it's just important to make sure if you're a healthy company, you've got some capital, get through things. And then what's your costs? And if it is a recession, which more likely than not, it is a recession, I'm not saying it is, but it probably is, then just watch your cash flow and get positive cash flow as soon as you can. So, yeah.

• 1:08:47Elon Musk?

  But I think we probably are in a recession and that recession will get worse. But, you know, these things pass and then there will be boom times to gain. So it'll probably be some tough going for, I don't know, a year. Maybe 12 to 18 months is usually the amount of time that takes for a correction to happen.

• 1:09:16Elon Musk?

  What do you guys think?

• 1:09:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. David, how do you feel about it?

• 1:09:21David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like it started. You know, what started as a slowdown earlier this year now seems like, I mean, technically, I guess we need two quarters of negative growth to be in a recession, but it feels like we're in one. It feels like it started. You know, the growth stock, the software businesses that we invest in are sort of the canaries in the coal mine. And there's a lot of, a lot of dead canaries.

• 1:09:43Jason Calacanis?

  They're having a hard time breathing?

• 1:09:45David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Elon Musk?

  It's not dead, it's just, it's just napping.

• 1:09:51Jason Calacanis?

  It's napping. Wake up, little birdie.

• 1:09:55Elon Musk?

  Wake up.

• 1:09:57Jason Calacanis?

  It's live.

• 1:09:59Elon Musk?

  It's just stunned. It's got, it got stunned for a brief moment and, and, and it just, it'll be fine.

• 1:10:07Elon Musk?

  It, it sort of reminds me of the parrot, that you have a pet shop sketch with a parrot with Monty Python.

• 1:10:16Elon Musk?

  Pining, this parrot is pining for the fjords.

• 1:10:19Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, Elon, a lot has been talked about as we wrap here, and you've been incredibly gracious, giving us so much time. Thank you for that. A lot of talk about American exceptionalism over the last couple of years waning, and maybe this country had seen its best days. And we see the work you're doing and other people in this great country are doing, and the debates we're having about the future. And yeah, China's doing pretty fantastic, Russia's on the ropes. But it does seem like America is still producing some of the greatest companies the world has ever seen, some of the greatest innovations. What are your thoughts on America and our future and what we need to keep this country

• 1:11:03Jason Calacanis?

  and this beacon of hope that, you know, four of the five of us were not born here? You know, two of you came from South Africa and... No, three of you. Three of you came from South Africa and one of you from Ca... I don't know what they're putting on the... Oh, from Sri Lanka. And from Sri Lanka and through Canada. Via Canada. Via Canada. He came through Canada, too. Yeah, I know. It seems like that's the, that's the way... Canada is a gateway. It is a gateway. How do we, it's a, well, I'm hinting at the answer here, but you know, it does seem like our immigration policy is absolutely insane. And maybe we need to keep collecting some of the great individuals that I get to share the stage with here and yourself. We need to keep bringing great people to this country. Why can't we get that in our heads?

• 1:11:46Jason Calacanis?

  That, not immigration, it's talent recruitment.

• 1:11:50Elon Musk?

  No, absolutely. I think it's incredibly important that the United States be like the destination for the world's best talent. I mean, you can think of this like, like a pro sports team. If you want to win the league and, and you know, you want the best players in your team. Now, there are obviously a lot of very talented people born in the United States, but if you could add a few aces from, from outside the country to the team, you're going to win the league. And, and, and here's the thing, those aces actually want to work for your team. They don't want to compete against you. They want, they want to be on Team America. And as it's like, we have to like fight them off to not be on Team America. That's the crazy thing.

• 1:12:34Elon Musk?

  And so it's like, if you had some aces that are the difference between winning and losing, we should be like really recruiting them. Like you'd recruit like a star basketball player or football player. That's what we should be doing. Active recruiting, just like if you're a company that wants, wants to succeed, you actively recruit the best talent. And then, and, and that's the way to win. And, and if that stops happening, America will stop winning.

• 1:13:01Jason Calacanis?

  And we have two administrations in a row, Biden and Trump, who don't want to let the greatest minds, the most talented people into this country. It's absolutely insane.

• 1:13:12Elon Musk?

  I mean, I think that-

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  You deal with this every day, right?

• 1:13:14Elon Musk?

  Yeah. Reality is like, actually, anyone who's going to, who wants to, to, to work hard and be, and do useful things. And, and this, you know, we want in the United States. And it's not just people who are sort of intellectually strong, but it's just anyone with a, with a strong work ethic, you know, if, if they're coming from Mexico, or if they're coming from, you know, Europe or China, wherever, it's just if, if they're like going to come here and crank hard and, and contribute more than they take, hell yeah. I mean, that's just, it's a no brainer.

• 1:13:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you been disappointed in the similarities between Biden and Trump on this? Like, maybe you could have expected it from Trump because that was the rhetoric he needed to use to get elected, but it's not as if Biden has flipped the script and said, "Okay, we're gonna go 180 degrees in the other direction." He's kind of kept it the same, which has been really surprising, actually.

• 1:14:09Elon Musk?

  Man, it's hard to tell what Biden is doing, to be totally frank. Yeah. Like, I feel like the...

• 1:14:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's weekend at Bernie's.

• 1:14:20Elon Musk?

  The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter, you know? It's like, it's like, the path to power is the path to the teleprompter, you know? Like, what, because that's that he just reads the teleprompter. So, you know, I do feel like if somebody would accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it's gonna be like Anchorman, it's gonna be like, "QQQASDF123," you know, type of thing.

• 1:14:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, in fairness to Biden, he hasn't been napping as much as he needs to, but...

• 1:14:50Elon Musk?

  It's just, it's hard to say. There are things that are getting done, you know? I mean, this administration just, it doesn't seem to get a lot done. Like, and, you know, whatever, like, the Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done. So, this administration seems just to not have, like, the drive to just get shit done. That, that, that's why, it's, that's my impression. So, you know, we definitely need to fix immigration policy. Like, we had COVID, which was an issue, and, and, and so that was like one reason to

• 1:15:33Elon Musk?

  like, not, you know, I guess, clamp down on it. But now, now we moved on, and so, but let's, let's just make sure we're getting top talent in the United States. And really, I'd say broadly, it's anyone who wants to work their ass off and, and contribute more than they take to the economy. Like, that's just necessarily gonna make for a stronger, better society in America.

• 1:15:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elon, did you see Jeff's, Bezos's tweet back and forth with Biden, where Biden, I think, was talking about inflation, but then he correlated that to taxing corporations, and Bezos said, "This is misinformation and disinformation," et cetera, et cetera. What did you, what did you think about that whole exchange then, back and forth?

• 1:16:16Elon Musk?

  I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously. So it's like the government can't just, you know, have issued checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation, you know, velocity of money held constant. So unless there's something would change with velocity of money, but it's just that if federal government writes checks, they don't, they never bounce. So that is effectively a creation of more, of more dollars. And if, if there are more dollars created, then the increase in the goods and services output of the economy, then you have inflation. Again, velocity of money held constant. But so this is just, this is very basic.

• 1:17:01Elon Musk?

  This is not like, you know, super complicated. And if, if the government could just issue massive amounts of money and have, and deficits didn't matter, then well, why don't we just make the deficit 100 times bigger? Okay. The answer is you can't because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless. So, and, and various countries have, have tried this experiment multiple times. It's not like, oh, I wonder what happens if this, if, if this is done. Yeah. Have you seen Venezuela? Like the, the poor people of Venezuela are, you know, have been just run roughshod by their government. And so obviously you can't simply create money.

• 1:17:45Elon Musk?

  The, the true economy is very important, like the true economy is the output of goods and services. It's not money. It's, it's literally what is the output of goods and services? Money is simply a way to, for us to, or anything that you call money is, is a way for us to conveniently exchange goods and services without having to engage in barter and also to shift obligations in time. That those are the two reasons that you have money, this thing called money. It's it's really it's a database. Money is is an is an information system for for labor allocation and for exchange of goods and services and for translating in time. And the quality of that information is a function of it's like you basically you can

• 1:18:27Elon Musk?

  apply information theory to money and and I think it it it helps explain why one money system is or why one action is better than another. And so if like the the money you you just just like a an internet connection, you'd want something that's high bandwidth, low latency and jitter and is not dropping packets, does not have a lot of errors in the system. And the same is true true of money. You you you want then and really like you said, what did PayPal really really do that helped improve the the the bandwidth, the the speed at which money could move. Instead of of mailing checks back and forth, which amazingly that was what people did

• 1:19:08Elon Musk?

  in in two thousand, you you could now do real time exchange of of money. And and now you could ship your goods immediately instead of mailing a check and waiting for the the bank to clear the check. So like and and the the ultimate thing with PayPal or if it sort of was in the X dot com sort of went went more less sort of niche payments, more sort of broad financial would be to simply does that doesn't mediate all the heterogeneous COBOL databases out there running on mainframes during batch processing and have a single real time system that that was secure and not batch processing.

• 1:19:48Elon Musk?

  And so it would just it would just be from an information standpoint, more efficient. And and eventually it would all the the batch processing COBOL mainframes operated by the banks would cease to exist.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  You've spent more time and built more in China than almost anybody. I mean, Apple would be the only company I could think of that's probably got a bigger footprint, but I'm not certain of that. What have you learned about China that you didn't know before you opened the factories there and started delivering cars there? And what should we know about China, you know, as Americans? How should we think about China and our relationship with it? Because we haven't spent time there.

• 1:20:28Elon Musk?

  Sure, well, I say like China, first of all, is not monolithic. It's not like everything is not some plot by the Chinese government. The, there are many factions within China that compete vigorously within China. And so, and perhaps most important is that there's just a tremendous number of hardworking, smart people in China who want to get ahead and get things done. And they're not complacent, and they're not entitled, and they're gonna, they're, they want to get things done, and they, they want to make a better life for themselves. And what we're gonna see with China, for the first time that anyone can remember who

• 1:21:12Elon Musk?

  is alive, is an economy that is twice the size of the US, possibly three times the size of the US. It's gonna be very weird, living in that world. So, we better stop the infighting in the US, and stop punching ourselves in the face, because like, there's a whole, there's way too much, you know, of America punching itself in the damn face, which is just dumb. And, and think about like, hey, we gotta be competitive here, and, and there's a new kid on the block that's gonna be two to three times our size, we better step up our game. And, you know, and stop infighting.

• 1:21:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You think it's easier to stop infighting once we're beaten? Or do you think that there's a way folks here can actually just, you know, get their political and commercial act together? But, or does it not happen until we've realized we've lost? Or do we need a war?

• 1:22:05Elon Musk?

  I should, I mean, we, I sure hope we don't even need a war. But there will be certainly, you know, an economic competition that I think will, will blow people away. And when they realize just how competitive they have to be to be competitive with companies in China, it's very difficult. You know, Tesla is competitive, but Tesla's competitive because we have an awesome team in China that, you know, so.

• 1:22:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like, do your Tesla China employees work some meaningful percentage more or harder than your Tesla non-China employees? Do you find like it's two different companies, basically?

• 1:22:46Elon Musk?

  Well, I mean, I think Tesla is somewhat, it Tesla's sort of pretty far out there in terms of work ethic anywhere in the world. So the Tesla work ethic in the US, I think, is substantially greater than any other car company or any large manufacturing company that I'm aware of. So, you know, Tesla, Tesla does have a strong work ethic in the US. But, but to be totally frank, the work ethic is exceeded on balance by the Tesla China

• 1:23:26Elon Musk?

  team. That is, I think, objectively true. So, there's not to say there aren't lots of hardworking people at Tesla US, there certainly are. But if you say on average, the work ethic in China is higher, it's just...

• 1:23:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tell us...

• 1:23:40Elon Musk?

  We're calling it like it is, you know, so...

• 1:23:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What about if you're an American CEO? How do you deal with, you think, just the need for managing all these political factions inside of a company? You probably saw, you know, all the sturm und drang related to Disney and what happened to them and what's continuing to happen to them on both sides, between their employees, as well as the governments, etc. You have any advice or what do you tell like young CEOs that you hang out with about how to deal with that? How to make those decisions where you land in the spectrum of dealing with all of this stuff? The non-work issues that are related to now, you know, going to work every day?

• 1:24:18Elon Musk?

  I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean, like...

• 1:24:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, whether it's the need for political correctness or the need for having political points of view and having to bring that and balance that in the workplace, how do you deal with that? How do you give advice to other folks about having to deal with it?

• 1:24:36Elon Musk?

  Look, I think, you know, the point of a company is to produce useful products and services for your fellow human beings. It is not, you know, some political gathering place or a thing where, that's the point of a company. Like, I'd say like it's, you know, politics and other stuff should...

• 1:24:58Elon Musk?

  Let's not lose sight of why companies should exist.

• 1:25:02Elon Musk?

  So, I gotta, I gotta, I'm actually late for...

• 1:25:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I apologize.

• 1:25:08Elon Musk?

  I gotta work on the rocket, guys.

• 1:25:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:12Jason Calacanis?

  We're gonna go ahead and let you get to Mars, and I'll see you soon. Ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk!

• 1:25:20Jason Calacanis?

  Nicely done, brother.

• 1:25:22David Sacks?

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:25:25Jason Calacanis?

  Brain Man David Sa...

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  And instead, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I. Queen of Kinoah.

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  We'll let your winners ride. We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Besties are gone.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  That is my dog taking a licking on your driveway. Oh, man. Oh, man.

• 1:25:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big Q, George, you could all just... It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:26:00Speaker 03

  What, you're the bee? What, you're a bee? What? We need to get merch.